Easy Company Soldier (16 page)

Operation Market Garden seemed as if it was becoming a waste of time—and of men. We'd lost about two dozen since the jump into Holland. James Miller, Raymond Schmitz, and Robert Van Klinken had been killed; others, like Buck, wounded. We hadn't gotten the bridge at Son because the Germans had already blown it. Hadn't been able to get through at Nuenen on our way to Helmond. For the first time, we'd been forced to retreat.

It was raining, nothing new for Holland. The British food was rotten. It was harvest season. Lots of fruit and pears. But you didn't smell that fresh fruit as much as you smelled mud and rancid water; ditches were always full of water in Holland.

“Mail call!”

It'd been so long since I'd gotten a letter I'd almost forgotten
what they were. Not that my one piece of mail was an emotional boost. It was an Oregon ballot. I'd be voting for the first time. Probably because an uncle whom I respected so much, Hugh Lacy, was violently opposed to Roosevelt, I voted for Thomas Dewey. I cast my ballot, sealed the envelope, and was standing around a campfire, with the others, when—
blam!
—a gun went off nearby. Sgt. Mike Ranney started cussing a blue streak. He'd shot himself in the leg, just below the knee, with the bullet lodged at his anklebone.

“There goes my damn battlefield commission,” he said with clenched teeth.

Nobody coveted the prestige of a commission more than Ranney; he was an apple-shiner from the word go. And you couldn't help but wonder if he'd perhaps quietly been promised something from Winters for being one of the point men on the Sobel ouster. Though he'd never get that commission, he would recover. And never have to fight another day in his life. Not in Holland. Not in Bastogne. Not anywhere. All because of a bullet in the leg fired by a gun he'd pulled the trigger on, apparently accidentally. Looking back, I've sometimes speculated whether it was Ranney's injury—and his being shipped back home—that got me thinking about the same thing around that campfire near Bastogne.

We moved onto the “Island” on October 2,1944, by truck. In the night. Our new mission was to fight the Germans on a three-mile-wide swath of land—farm fields below sea level, surrounded by dikes with narrow roads on top—between the Lower Rhine River on the north and the Waal River on the south. The Germans occupied the east half; we had the
west. They wanted it all—now—and launched an offensive to make it theirs.

Easy Company was rotated to the intersection of the dike and the elevated north-south railroad between Driel and Arnhem. The position was a platoon assignment with a fifteen-hundred-yard gap on one flank and two thousand yards on the other. Two contact patrols worked their way each night to the adjoining units to compensate for the lack of troops. The Germans controlled the railroad dike, which required everyone to stay out of view of the railroad during daylight hours. Virtually all movement was done at night.

It was to be a five-day mission. Instead, we'd be stuck here until late November, the longest time Easy Company would be in the same place. The weather was cold and rainy. We started calling it Hell's Corner.

Dick Winters had been promoted to executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, meaning no more combat duty, replaced by 1st Lt. Fred “Moose” Heyliger. Winters liked him. I liked him. He was mortar guy, like me.

On October 5, Easy Company caught an attacking German unit in a field. It was one of those fish-in-a-barrel moments that was both exhilarating and sad. As the soldiers fled, they were picked off right and left, though some returned fire. David Webster got his “million-dollar” wound that day, and William Dukeman, a guy who'd been with us since Toccoa, died. Eleven Germans surrendered.

Later, a German “King” Tiger tank came into that area from Opheusden to the west of us. We had an antitank gun set up at the junction of a farm road, and as the tank neared, our gun opened fire. It was like a peashooter against a dinosaur; I doubt our gun did much more than give the German crew inside a headache. But after it was hit about
twenty-five times, it started backing up. The left-side tread slid into a ditch and the tank couldn't move.

Shortly after the incident, I came across our crew that had done the firing. Had anyone gone up to the tank? I asked. Nope. I did and discovered the tank was empty. I believe it had some sort of escape hatch in the bottom. The next day I came back with a screwdriver and ripped off the manufacturer's plate, thinking it would be a good souvenir. I sent it home, just one of many items that my folks would leave behind when they moved from the cabin.

On October 23,1 was called in by Heyliger for an unusual mission. Technically, it would be known as Operation Pegasus, though we all just called it “the rescue.” A British paratrooper, Col. O. Dobey, also known as the Mad Colonel of Arnhem, had been wounded and captured by the Germans, but he escaped from a hospital, swam across the Lower Rhine, and somehow got in touch with Colonel Sink. Some 125 British troops, 10 Dutch resistance fighters, and 5 American pilots were hiding out with the Dutch underground beyond the Lower Rhine. Could E Company help?

Heyliger agreed to a daring rescue attempt. He picked his guys, mainly 3rd Platoon personnel and some others, seventeen total, ticking off the names as each of us waited to hear if his would be among them.

“Malarkey.” You hear your name and it's a different feeling from being back at Star of the Sea choosing sides for dodgeball. It means putting your life on the line, in this case for a bunch of guys you didn't even know. But this wasn't Star of the Sea; this was the military. So, even though you were dog-tired and a little worried, you did what you were asked.
Currahee! We stand alone together.

It would be like nothing we'd ever done before: cross the
Lower Rhine in darkness and bring back more than a hundred people who were behind enemy lines. It seemed simple on paper: two Easy Company riflemen per boat, my partner to be Herman “Hack” Hansen, a guy from Chicago whose nickname came from some baseball player he liked. He was a happy-go-lucky guy who'd do anything for his pals.

Dobey had somehow maintained phone communication with the underground; each night before the rescue attempt, the escapees would creep closer to the north bank of the Lower Rhine. So they'd know where to gather at the river's edge, each night at midnight, on our side, a British 40 mm Beaufort gun would fire tracer bullets. And on the actual night of the rescue, British artillery would fire incendiary shells into the high ground, west of Arnhem, to provide a background of fire that would silhouette those being rescued on the river's north banks, so we could see where they were. The British rubber rafts were to be hidden the night before the crossing in an inlet formed from high water surging into the orchards. Surrounded by trees like that, the boats couldn't be seen by German air surveillance or through field glasses from across the river.

At about 1:00 a.m. on the night we expected the signal to go, I was leaning up against one of the orchard trees, my back to Hansen on the other side. My gut was churning a little bit more than usual, and not because of the rotten food. Having practically grown up on the Nehalem River, I was comfortable on water—but, then, I'd never had to rescue people in the black of night, right out from beneath the enemy's nose.

That's the thing about war, you never knew what was going to be thrown your way: a drop from a plane, an attack on an artillery nest, a rescue across a river. The only common
thread was the chance that, this time, you'd be among those not coming back. In war, chance follows you like the stench of your uniforms, wherever you go.

“This'll be a miracle if it works,” I whispered to Hansen.

I'd hardly gotten the words out when we saw something flash in the distance, across the river. “Malark, it's the light,” he said. “Time to go.”

A red flashlight was blinking the V-for-Victory signal, our signal from the rescuers to come. Machine gunners from the 2nd Platoon positioned their guns, in case things went south and we needed support, though, at night, such an exchange meant a high chance of us getting riddled by friendly fire. No two ways about it: This was a high-risk, high-reward operation. We slid into the boats, nearly twenty men in about eight to ten craft, and, as quietly as possible, started to cross. We were the lead boat heading across the river, which was about fifty yards wide at this point.

One oar splashing a bit too loudly … one tommy gun clinking against another … hell, one sneeze … and, for all we knew, Germans outposts could open fire and send us all to the bottom of the river. About fifteen minutes passed. But about ten yards from the north shore, I lowered my eyes just below the bow and could see figures huddled on the bank, the fires from the incendinary bombs giving us just enough light to see silhouettes of them.

I eased myself off the bow, about waist deep, and held the boat. A group of soldiers, many British with red berets, were huddled together.

“You our passengers?” I whispered.

“Yes, yes, thank you, thank you so much,” one whispered back. Others patted Hansen and me on the back. “Thank you, thank you.”

We helped about a dozen get into our boat. Most of the escapees were British paratroopers, but in our boat we had two American pilots and a British tank sergeant commander from the 7th Armored Division, who were known as the Rats of Tobruk after their gutsy fighting in the sands of North Africa. Once we got to the south shore, we left the boats on the bank and took the escapees over the dike to a facility set up just for them. En route, the tank commander turned to me.

“Sergeant,” he said, “thank you for rescuing us. Good to be alive, but I've had it. No more combat. This is the fifth time my wife has been a widow and that's going to be the end of it.”

The entire operation had gone off without a hitch. As the stories unraveled, we were amazed to learn that the escapees had, with help, been infiltrated through Germany units, day and night, coming from a variety of directions. It had all been coordinated by Dutch women in concert with the underground. Some had moved down to the river's edge from as far as fifty miles away. And now all were safe.

Bill Guarnere, the kid from Philly, thought he knew how to ride a motorcycle. He was wrong. He busted up a leg after trying his luck on a German cycle and was sent back to -England to recover. Suddenly I found myself replacing him as acting platoon sergeant. We got hit hard in an artillery bombardment, E and F companies splintered with eighteen wounded, though none died. And we lost Lieutenant Heyliger, accidentally gunned down by one of our own guys on a dike one night. He didn't die, but, busted up pretty bad, he, too, was sent to England. His replacement was Norman Dike Jr., an East Coast blue blood with no combat experience
who would later freeze like a Popsicle in the midst of an assault.

In Holland, I'd cross paths with Skip Muck two or three times a week, more if we were back in reserve. He was doing OK, though, like me, was getting tired of the weather. The rain continued; the most common smell was mud. Foxholes were like big buckets of water, and so when we found a barn or outbuilding or house, it was as if heaven-sent. The bad food continued, British rations. Mutton and stuff. Our beards grew and bodies stank. Shower? What was that?

Some people think of soldiers in war and imagine us fighting day after day, endlessly. But much of the time, it's like being an anesthesiologist: 90 percent boredom and 10 percent panic. Yes, your job was combat, but much time was spent getting from one place to another, finding out where the enemy was without him finding out where you were, maneuvering into position. And waiting. Always waiting. On the Island, we weren't in a lot of day-to-day combat. Mainly a lot of night patrol work. The 1st Platoon saw more combat than those of us in the 2nd.

At Driel, just west of Arnhem, some in E Company would listen on the radio to “Arnhem Annie,” a German propaganda broadcaster. I'd have preferred a little Glenn Miller, but it was a hoot listening to her inviting us all to cross the river, surrender, and live in luxury until the war ended. We'd rather stink and eat bad food. Instead, the 506th's POW Interrogation Team, using a loudspeaker, invited the Germans to surrender to us. It became pretty clear that nobody was surrendering to anyone else, period.

One day, Winters prepped me for a reconnaissance mission, saying, “A British artillery corps wants to use us as forward observers from the south bank of the Rhine.”

Knowing that the British usually used their trained observers for missions like this, I was my usual blunt self: “What the hell do I know about artillery observation, Captain?” I wasn't afraid of penetrating enemy lines, but was just not a specialist at it like some others.

“Funny, I asked them the same question,” said Winters, “and they said all they wanted was vehicular movement detected between Arnhem and Wageningen. I'm choosing you.”

Soon, I was huddled with Winters and British artillery officers, going over maps and aerial photographs.

“You'll need to build a camouflaged duck blind as an observation post,” one said. “You need good visibility of the tree-lined east-west road. Report all vehicle movement and identify it in relation to predesignated landmarks. Report by radio to one of our officers who will be with Winters, south of the dike.”

I nodded an assurance that looked more confident than it felt. But I'd have my ol' buddy from the Northwest, Rod Bain, along with his radio and rifleman Eugene Jackson. Good guys, both.

The operation would take place the following day, with my moving into the orchard an hour before daylight. The nightly outpost would remain in position until we relieved them. But about 4:30 a.m., as I was saying good-bye to Winters, in walk the guys on that outpost.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I said.

“We thought it was time to come in,” said the corporal of the outfit.

I looked at him with disgust. “You thought wrong.” Then I walked out. We hadn't even started and we already had a strike against us: nobody out in front with eyes on the krauts.